The Biden Administration released today the broad outlines of it first budget request. Often referred to as the “skinny budget,” the proposal includes very topline Administration budget requests for various departments and agencies for the coming year. The detailed full budget request will not be available until later this spring.
The 58-page document is available on the White House website here.
The entire package calls for approximately $1.5 trillion in discretionary spending for FY2022, and includes a modest 1.7-percent increase for Defense and a16-percent increase for non-defense programs from the current levels. Taken together, the Biden budget proposal calls for an 8-percent increase in all discretionary spending over FY2021.
Some of the topline highlights include:
- a new $6.5-billion ARPA-H within the NIH, which would be funded at $51 billion under this budget request
- a new $14-billion investment in climate related activities across the entire federal government
- an increase of 41 percent for the Department of Education (ED), for a total of approximately $102 billion
In addition to ED, the budget request calls for the following funding levels for the following agencies:
- $10.2 billion for NSF (increase of $1.7 billion, or 20%)
- $6.9 billion for NOAA (increase of $1.4 billion)– within this proposed amount is $800 million to expand investments in climate research, support regional and local decision-making with climate data and tools, and improve community resilience to climate change.
- $1.4 billion for Department of Interior (increase of $2.4 billion, or 16%)
- $24.7 billion for NASA (increase of $1.5 billion, or 6.3%)
- $46.1 billion for Department of Energy (increase of $4.3 billion, or 10.2%)
- $1 billion for a new ARPA-Climate
Within the ED budget, the Biden plan calls for an increase of $400 in the Pell Grant maximum from the discretionary side of the budget. The Pell Grant program is funded with both discretionary and mandatory spending and it remains to be seen whether an increase in mandatory spending for Pell will be included in the detailed budget proposal that is expected to be released later this spring.